Chapter 2 because the requested relief would not change the outcome of either of the appellants’ races, we decline to issue the writ. However, the requirements of a poll ticket audit and the presence of a quorum of the commission during the hand count shall be strictly applied in the future. At 446 (emphasis supplied).30 But there was an indication that someone had tampered with the vote counting equipment. The ballots were cardboard cards. The votes marked on the cards were tabulated by a computer. The computer was prepared for the vote count by the use of an application deck. There was a public test of the application deck for the Kanawha County election. It had no errors. A duplicate copy of the deck was sent to the state election commission. The deck was tested several times again, both before and after the vote count and no errors were found. But errors in the application deck were found before the votes were canvassed. This meant that the application deck was determined to be errorless in seven separate tests before the errors were identified and brought to the attention of the board of canvassers. The plaintiffs claimed that this situation placed the integrity of the election in question and “raises the possibility that the deck had been tampered with after it was certified as errorless by the commission.”31 As to this irregularity, the supreme court said, The integrity of the mechanism for tabulating the results of public elections is unquestionably a matter of the utmost public concern. We therefore order that the program and application decks placed with the state election commission…be brought from the office of the state election commission for purposes of analysis and comparison with the decks employed in the actual count. At 447. Then the case was remanded for further proceedings. The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals’ decision made it clear that the errors in the application deck did not cause any change in the outcome of the election. But there is no indication whether that court would have decided that any tampering with the application deck, if proven, sufficiently tainted the integrity of the election to have the results recounted. We can presume, however, based on the cases discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, that the court would have left the election results as they were because the tampering would not have changed the results of the election. We also can conclude that the court would have made a strong recommendation that a criminal investigation and prosecution be pursued under state law against those who tampered with the equipment. Dan Deffebach was another plaintiff who believed that the facts in the record of his lawsuit showed that sufficient irregularities occurred to void the election. A $10.1 million bond issue had passed by 14 votes out of 1,732 total votes in a 1981 bond election in the Chapel Hill Independent School District, Texas. Mr. Deffebach said that there was no fraud by election officials or voters, but he challenged the length of the absentee voting period, the fact that six people voted on “homemade” paper absentee ballots, and the fact that 425 voters who did not present their voter registration certificate at the polls also did not sign the required affidavit before they were allowed to vote. The trial court found that the absentee voting period was long enough under the statute, that the homemade ballots were acceptable because they set out the propositions and gave voters an opportunity to The supreme court found that those statutory requirements were mandatory, not directory as the plaintiffs had suggested, because they used the word “shall.” We will see in the next chapter that most often the failure to perform a mandatory function can cause an election to be voided. This consequence leads many courts to define state statutes as directory when the irregularity is challenged after it is capable of being corrected, in order to avoid voiding an election. Here the court simply concluded that the mandatory nature of the provision did not require such relief because it would not have made any difference in the results of the election. 31 The errors in the application deck were corrected, and the votes in the affected races were tabulated again. 30 23